Last week’s XBLA release, AMY, recently received a raft of bad publicity with large numbers of negative reviews scored across most gaming review sites. Today a post was made on the game’s official Facebook page in it’s defence and some advice for frustrated gamers to switch to Easy mode to improve your enjoyment:

As many of you have already heard, AMY is a HARD game. Some people totally disliked that while other really enjoyed it. We believe this is part of the survival experience we tried to build as we wanted the game to be challenging. However, we actively listen to the community and comments and hence recommend the non-hard core gamers to launch the game in EASY mode (in the settings) for now. This will give them a much more pleasant and smoother experience, especially as the checkpoints are scarce.

The XBLA version currently has a metacritic score of 23.77% with the PSN version sitting slightly higher at 26.71%. Here at XBLAFans we’re not a fan of numbers but we also rated the game poorly, pointing out that the controls are “clunky, slow and slightly delayed” and recommending you “Skip It”. However the game’s makers are keen to point out that it has been at the top of the XBLA charts since launch and players on the marketplace have rated it between 3 and 4 stars out of 5.

So did the reviews get it wrong? Reading between the lines, the developers seem to agree that there is a problem. Let’s hope that the use of the phrase “for now” hints at a future fix with the advice to drop the difficulty being a temporary work around. Let us know what you think and check out our full review here.

About Christine Mitchell

Christine has been a gamer for many years starting on the ZX Spectrum. Based in Scotland she is an IT professional but is excited to be working for XBLAFans and hopes to make the jump into Journalism. Follow Christine on Twitter @Miss_AllSunday

AnonEmouse

Nope, just ‘Too Lame’.

https://twitter.com/#!/Mysticfail JD

Well the reviews on XBL i don’t think count for much, how often do you ever see rating not 4 or better? Even games universally panned rarely even 3 from what I can remember .

Anonymous

I actually found it to be the opposite – the puzzles and enemies I played in the demo (which I acknowledge might not be truly representative of what comes later) were laughably easy. What kept me from buying the full version was the stilted, ridiculous dialogue and the cheap attempts at scares in the form of exploding speakers and computer monitors. I really wanted this game to be awesome, but it just didn’t do it for me.

http://twitter.com/J0HN_D John Drawdy

First off the level of difficulty is rubbish, most things can be avoided easily and even with a broken fighting system, enemies are easily defeated. That aside, them saying “For us, the players’ ratings (almost 9500 so far) are the most important ones.” We the reviewers played it and play many other games for that fact, there for we are players too.

Guest

Ha. Seems to me that the developers are just trying to make up for their apparent laziness.

The game is bad. You can’t just pin it on game reviewers and suggest that they found the game to be extremely hard. There is a certain threshold between making a game challenging and downright frustrating. Challenges are satisfying when completed, mainly because the opportunity for completing the challenge is present. Frustration is essentially making a game challenging for all of the wrong reasons. Bad hit detection and extremely sloppy controls do not count for a satisfying challenge.

Please don’t go down the route of Resident Evil 5. We don’t need any more messes like that in the modern game industry. Make the game challenging if you will, but at least make it reasonably playable before you publish it.

Gamer32

yes it is hard for most gamers. Too hard to put up with because it is such a crappy game.

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